Sheikh Zainuddin also rendered Shaikh Zain ud-Din or Shaykh Zayn al-Din was a painter from Patna who rose to prominence in Calcutta during the closing years of the 1770s. Trained in the Mughal tradition he worked from 1777 for Sir Elijah Impey and Lady Mary Impey and became the most prolific of the three painters who recorded the birds and animals of their private aviary and menagerie. His large studies of birds and plants set the precision of Mughal miniature painting against European conventions of natural history illustration and stand among the outstanding forerunners of the Company style. Almost nothing else of his life has been recorded and his reputation rests on the paintings themselves.
Early Life
Nothing securely recorded survives of the birth date or parentage of Sheikh Zainuddin and the earliest fixed point in his story is the phrase that he wrote beneath his own paintings declaring himself a Native of Patna. Museum attributions therefore place his birth in that city and describe him as one of a small group of Muslim artists from Patna who worked in Calcutta. No source names his teachers or describes his schooling and yet the refinement of his surviving work accords with the Mughal training that the Ashmolean attributes to him. A Sotheby’s catalogue note more cautiously says that it can be assumed he learned the Mughal techniques of miniature painting at Patna. His childhood and his family background and whatever outlook his household held remain beyond the reach of the evidence and a reader is better served by that admitted silence than by invention.
Artistic Journey
The documented career of Sheikh Zainuddin begins in 1777 when Lady Mary Impey wife of the Chief Justice of Bengal took the lead in commissioning pictures of the birds and animals kept at the Calcutta home that she shared with Sir Elijah. The Impeys belonged to the scholarly circle around the Governor-General Warren Hastings and Lady Impey selected specimens from her menagerie and advised on the style and content of each picture while the painter from Patna answered by enlarging the scale of his Mughal training and adapting it to Western expectations. The pictures were painted often at life size on large sheets of imported English paper so that the old precision of the miniature was stretched across a field it had never been asked to fill. A typical sheet carries the name of the creature in Persian or Urdu and its measurements and an inscription stating that it is in the collection of Lady Impey at Calcutta and painted by Zayn al-Din Native of Patna with a date and a number from the original series. Many bear the seal of Sir Elijah on the reverse. The compositions reveal how quickly he absorbed foreign convention since the absence of landscape and even ground colour derives from European natural history painting while the exact line and delicate colour remain thoroughly Mughal. After about three years he was joined by two other painters from Patna and the project reached a total of 326 drawings of which 197 were birds with Zainuddin remaining the most prolific of the three. He also added plant studies to the collection of Sir William Jones. The work ended when the Impeys left India in 1783 and with their departure the record of his activity falls silent. Nothing is known of his teachers or of any formal institution that shaped him or of his later years and so his career must be read entirely through the sheets that survive.
Signature Works
1. An Orange-Headed Ground Thrush and a Death’s-Head Moth on a Purple Ebony Orchid Branch
Year: 1778. Medium: Opaque watercolor(Gouache) and ink on paper sheet
Current Location: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA.
2. Black-hooded Oriole and Insect on Jackfruit Stump
Year: 1778. Medium: Opaque watercolor(Gouache) and ink on paper
Current Location: Asian Art department, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, USA.
3. Indian Roller on Sandalwood Branch
Year: 1779. Medium: Opaque watercolor(Gouache) and ink on paper
Current Location: Asian Art department, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, USA.
4. Brahminy Starling with Two Antheraea Moths, Caterpillar, and Cocoon on Indian Jujube Tree
Year: c. 1777. Medium: Opaque watercolor(Gouache) and ink on paper sheet
Current Location: Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, USA.
5. Brahminy Starling on Neem Tree Branch
Year: c. 1780. Medium: Opaque watercolor(Gouache) and ink on paper
Current Location: Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, USA.
6. Hwamei on Terminalia Branch
Year: 1780. Medium: Opaque watercolor(Gouache) and ink on paper
Current Location: Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, USA.
7. Rufous Treepie and Caterpillar on Branch
Year: c. 1777. Medium: Opaque watercolor(Gouache) and ink on paper
Current Location: Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, USA.
8. Sarus Crane (Grus antigone)
Year: c. 1780. Medium: Opaque watercolor(Gouache) and ink on paper
Current Location: Department of Eastern Art, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (on loan from the Radcliffe Science Library).
9. Common Crane (Grus grus)
Year: 1780. Medium: Opaque watercolor(Gouache) and ink on paper
Current Location: Radcliffe Science Library, University of Oxford, UK (shown at the Ashmolean).
10. Great Flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber)
Year: 1781. Medium: Opaque watercolor(Gouache) and ink on paper
Current Location: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (on loan from the Radcliffe Science Library).
11. Adjutant Stork (Leptoptilos dubius)
Year: c. 1780. Current Location: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK
12. Sulphur-crested Cockatoo on a Custard Apple Branch
Year: 1777. Current Location: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK
13. Indian Hornbill (Anthracoceros malabaricus)
Year: c. 1777. Current Location: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK
14. Study of a Stork (inscribed “Jankhal”)
Year: 1781. Current Location: Private collection (sold at Sotheby’s, London, 2016; current owner unknown).
Awards and Recognition
>Ashmolean, 2012 to 2013. Lady Impey’s Indian Bird Paintings ran from 16 October 2012 to 14 April 2013 and was almost entirely his work.
>RAMM and University of Exeter, 2016 to 2018. Researchers, including Dr Nandini Chatterjee, identified 17 drawings as by him and two other Patna painters, working with Kolkata’s Victoria Memorial Hall.
>Wallace Collection, 2019 to 2020. Forgotten Masters named him among its honoured artists and reunited about 30 Impey paintings.
>Tate, Artist and Empire, 2015 to 2016. His works were shown in this display.
Impact
The surest measure of the influence of Sheikh Zainuddin lies in the fact that his pictures served as evidence long before they were admired as art. The notes that Lady Impey kept on the habits of her birds and the drawings that accompanied them were examined by the ornithologist John Latham who named several new species from them in his supplement of 1787 and in this way the sheets painted in Calcutta entered the foundations of later studies of Indian birds. As painting they stand among the outstanding forerunners of the Company style that Indian artists went on to practise for British and other European patrons well into the nineteenth century and museums now present him as the foremost painter of the Impey series. No pupils or followers are recorded and so his influence must be traced in the style he helped to found and not in a documented school. His name meanwhile came close to disappearing since his Bengali signature had long been misread until researchers at Exeter working with the Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata restored it. When the Wallace Collection reunited about thirty Impey paintings in London in 2019 its director Xavier Bray called the work “incredibly precise and beautifully observant” and William Dalrymple described the artists as extraordinary painters whose brilliance had been overlooked. Today his sheets are held in Oxford and New York and Minneapolis and London and a single page from the album can fetch more than three hundred thousand pounds at auction.